“From these experiments, adds M. Serres, it results that the liquid furnished by M. Gannal preserves bodies to a certain extent:
“1. Permitting their dissection during summer, a thing which has not been accomplished heretofore in the anatomical school of the hospitals. 2. Permitting to give to the instruction of operative medicine a development which, up to the present period, it had not enjoyed; for, during the months of August and September, we were enabled to preserve, as in the middle of winter, thirty bodies at a time on the tables, enabling us to repeat to seventy pupils all the operations, in following a regular course, previously impossible.”
To this series of observations, already so decisive, we shall add the intelligence furnished us by different anatomists well known to science.
Thus M. Dubreuil, the honourable dean of the faculty of Medicine of Montpelier, hastened, in the interest of anatomical studies, to make the necessary trials to assure himself of the efficacy of the process in question. During the spring of last year, the first body on which he operated was preserved for forty-one days, and the experiment was terminated without any thing announcing putrefaction. On a second body the result was the same, although it was chosen under the most unfavourable conditions.
M. Bougery, who, it is known, is occupied in the publication of a great work on anatomy, declares that this process has very well succeeded in his hands, and that it has been very useful to him. In summer he injected two subjects which were preserved for three weeks; in winter, he injected a third, and this, although kept in a room heated to 15°, was preserved for seven weeks.
M. Azoux, who, at a distance from Paris, has formed an establishment for the manufacture of his artificial anatomical preparations, employs the process of M. Gannal, in order to place before the eyes of his workmen the preparations which they are to reproduce. This process has rendered him great service.
MM. Velpeau and Amussat, who have had occasion to put it to the proof, have been equally well satisfied with it.
Your commission was further enlightened by a report made to the Academy of Medicine, which includes circumstantial details of the successive trials through which M. Gannal had to pass before attaining the simple and easy method which he employs at present.
After the whole of the intelligence which it has collected, your commission feels itself authorized to say, that the process of M. Gannal, as it now exists, may render the greatest service to anatomical studies; that it divests them, in great part, of what is repulsive, and deprives them almost entirely, perhaps, of what is insalubrious.